Sergio Palacios

Underground

We are incredibly excited to launch Shrine Underground. This new exhibition space on the lower level of the gallery will be used to highlight new emerging artists and also provide a platform for discoveries within the self taught art field. First up is Sergio Palacios, who I went to art school with many, many moons ago.

"I started making art, painting in high school around 1989, and also majored in painting at U.T. in Austin. I worked for a contractor then painting newly vacated apartments at a massive senior living facility. When I moved to New York in 1997 to pursue an MFA and an art career, I started working at a few galleries and museums as an art handler, and also building, patching and painting walls.

In the studio, I was painting surreal super-psychedelic scenes based on a vast mythology of my own making. I then spent 12 years patching and painting the walls of the Guggenheim Museum until I was let go. Following that, I started doing more and more commercial jobs like residential renovations and retail build-outs; also doing carpentry, taping, painting and some concrete and brick work.

All of this time I was getting nowhere with my art, and I finally stoped making art at all and just worked as a self-unemployed painter and contractor. I did my best to make peace with the fact that it was my destiny to paint walls, not art.

After 5 or 6 years of this, and during the pandemic, I started painting again. I’m not sure why. The paintings felt really different, maybe it was the lockdown, being stuck inside for two years staring at the walls, and seeing them closing in on me. Seeing the ceilings coming down too. Maybe because after 30 years of making walls, they were so alive now, and my only companions. But something happened, and now the walls were my art. I’ve always thought my best work was the stuff made without understanding why. It just makes itself."

—Sergio Palacios

Sergio Palacios (b. 1971, Corpus Christi, TX) received a BFA at University of Texas at Austin in 1996, attended Skowhegan in 1997 and completed a MFA at SUNY Purchase in 1999. Wall Paintings is Palacios’ first exhibition with Shrine.